‘Sicilian dogs and Spartan pestles’. The historical figures in Aristophanes’ comedies
Stefan Hofbauer, Institute for Classical Studies, Research Area: Ancient History
In the fifth century BC, comedy emerged as a distinct theatrical form alongside tragedy and has undergone continuous development ever since. Whilst New Comedy (from the fourth century BC onwards) focused on humorous character types, Old Comedy was characterised by political allusions as well as caricatures and parodies of real-life figures. Of the more than 500 plays of Old Comedy that were performed, only eleven have survived in full or almost in full – and they all come from a single author: Aristophanes. These plays were performed in the period between the Peloponnesian War and the Corinthian War and contain numerous jokes, ranging from biting to crude, at the expense of the politicians in power at the time – as well as artists, philosophers and other public figures.
The aim of this doctoral project is a prosopographical study of the historical figures mentioned in the eleven surviving comedies. The nearly 300 men and women were analysed in terms of their role within the comedies and compared with parallel sources, scholia and fragments in order to paint as objective a picture as possible of these individuals.
Supervisor: Margit Linder
An Interpretive Commentary on Avian's Fables
Christopher Poms, Departement of Classics
From its intellectual origins in Bronze Age Mesopotamia to Avian’s collection of verse fables from late antiquity (ca. 400 CE)—the subject of this dissertation project—the ancient fable “wandered” through numerous languages and cultures of the Mediterranean region, thus representing, as it were, a trans-cultural and trans-Mediterranean literary genre. On its “journey,” the ancient fable has acquired a wide variety of semantic connotations. The aim of this dissertation project is to interpretatively analyze Avian’s collection of fables. To this end, the form of an interpretive commentary was chosen, which, in contrast to a lemmatized commentary, offers a coherent text with detailed annotations.
Advisor: Ursula Gärtner
